Heres looking at you, again and again and ....

Another fairly miserable day, the rain has stooped, the wind has dropped but the fog is as thick as fog.

Another day with the microscope. The main photograph shows part of the surface of the compound eye of a water beetle, prepared for microscopy in 1873.

The extra is a reflected light photomicrograph of the elytra (wing case) of a diamond beetle, vintage 1882.. The focus is very patchy but the surface of the elytra is uneven and the depth of field of the microscope lens very small indeed.

"Some beetles are sometimes referred to as ‘living jewels’, in allusion to the strikingly diverse array of iridescence mechanisms and optical effects that have arisen in beetles. A number of novel and sophisticated reflectance mechanisms have been discovered in recent years, including three-dimensional photonic crystals and quasi-ordered coherent scattering arrays." No, I don't understand this either but you can get a full explanation in the paper from which I took the quote; read all about it here!